So you want to to improve your website’s conversion rate. Or gauge how people feel about your MVP. Or put out feelers to see what they think about your website. Or incentivize them to make a sale. Or learn what you could and should be doing to improve the user experience.

Consider the survey your new best friend. They’re easy as pie to use (pie graphs included!), many are customizable, and they give you concrete, actionable answers to just these sorts of questions -- and all in real time.

Provided you’re using the right kinds ofsurveys in the right ways, that is.

Fret not, because we’re shedding light on some of the signposts of effective customer surveys and how to use them to guide you down the path toward consumer enlightenment.

Try for a moment to imagine PB&J without the J. Or Garfunkel without Simon. Or yin without yang. They just go better together. The same holds true for quantitative and qualitative data. The trick is homing in on surveys that strike the perfect balance between measuring these two types of data.

Quantitative data relies on close-ended questions that lets you stamp a hard numerical value on the things you want to know. Quantitative surveys are especially useful when looking at large numbers of people. And from the consumer perspective, they’re quick and easy to complete.

Qualitative data is your golden opportunity to pass your customers the microphone so they can broadcast their innermost thoughts and feelings in greater detail and with greater contextualisation.

These kinds of open-ended questions allow for a wide range of individualized responses, helping you learn something totally new you might not have expected and uncover unforeseen problems that you can actively improve upon. They also inspire honest feedback from your respondents more so than a face-to-face or phone-deployed survey.

On the flipside, you can repurpose any positive responses that you receive as testimonials to trumpet just how crazy awesome you are.

In an age of attention spans that last about as long as a Snapchat, brevity is an absolute must.

People are pressed for time, and even when they’re not, the fewer, to-the-point questions that you ask your visitors, the more responses you’re bound to get, and vice versa. Same goes for the length of survey questions themselves.

But how long is too long? While there’s no specific magic number, micro surveys focusing on 1-5 ultra-concise questions is generally a good rule of thumb.

At the same time, it’s also important to keep your questions laid out in simple, plain-spoken language. To heed the sagely advice of Mark Twain, “Don’t use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do.”

Try to remember that everyone interprets language differently, and by dispensing with highfalutin words (#primeexample) and industry-specific jargon, you’ll be able to better engage a much larger population of your audience.

It’s fairly safe to say that when it comes to tech devices, the almighty smartphone reigns supreme.

People reach for their phones moments after their eyes first pop open in the morning. They check emails during meals or -- heaven forbid! -- a brief lull in conversation. They flex their multitasking skills by perusing Facebook while using the bathroom (don’t act like you haven’t).

Over half of American adults today own a smartphone and carry it with them wherever they go, and for some, their smartphone represents their primary entry point to the internet.

“More and more, customers are learning about you, buying, and contacting you on their mobile devices. If you don’t provide a great mobile experience, they will eventually find someone who does.” -- Caleb Elston | Delighted

Whether your customers are on their smartphone or tablet, mobile-optimized survey software enables you to maximize your engagements at every single touchpoint without having to do any extra heavy lifting.

The beauty of mobile optimization is that the software automatically adjusts the screen size and layout of the survey depending on which particular device your customer happens to be using, making it easily readable and navigable.

On top of that, mobile survey results bounce back in real time, keeping you in-the-know and primed to spring into action at the drop of a hat.

If you had to venture to guess the average rate of online shoppers who abandon their cart, what number would you throw out? 25%? 50%?

According to a 2016 study by Baymard Institute, shopping cart abandonment is nearly 69%. The biggest reason? They found that 58.6% of online shoppers based in the US abandoned a cart within the past 3 months because they were either “just browsing” or “not ready to buy.”

A survey tool like Informizely gives you the ability to intervene at precise moments to gently nudge on-the-fence visitors toward the checkout line. By enticing your customers with coupon codes, giveaways, or promotions, you can increase shopping cart conversion and decrease abandonments.

If you’re visiting the Apple store to get more details about the iPhone 7 and Tim the sales associate approaches you to ask your feelings on storm insurance, your first thought is that Tim the sales associate has gone insane.

Your second thought is, this has nothing to do with what I’m looking for, so I’m going to head over to Samsung instead.

Thanks to the power of survey skip logic, consumers can, you guessed it, skip over questions that don’t apply to them, automatically narrowing down the ones that perfectly align with what they’re doing on your site, and they’ll actually answer it.

This ensures that your surveys are super applicable to your customer, and that the data you collect is of the highest, most accurate quality.

Perhaps the most important lesson of Surveys 101 is when to deploy them.

Having the ability to determine when and under what conditions you interact with your customer can have a profound impact on your results. For instance, approximately 0% of people want a pop-up to be the very first thing they see when they visit your site.

But by programming them strategically based on criteria like number of visits, URL patterns, and other custom variables, your visitors have more time to establish their footing and become familiar with what you have to offer.

The Big Takeaway

Building a loyal customer base is absolutely critical to remaining both competitive and relevant for businesses in the twenty-first century.

Failing to effectively engage with your audience leads to missed opportunities to deliver the things they actually want, translating to a cycle of missed conversions and a bottom line that suffers as a result. And unless your company runs on the power of magic, chances are you tend to prefer cash in hand over cash left on the table.

In this article, we’ve highlighted several techniques for using surveys to help you avoid second-guessing where and how to devote your time and resources to increasing conversions.

It all comes down to taking that first step and initiating the conversation. And as with any two-way conversation, in order to respond appropriately, you have to listen first.